Are You My Cousin?

By A. J. Jacobs

Jan. 31, 2014

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CreditCreditJim Stoten

I LOVE my family, but I’m glad I don’t have to buy birthday presents for all my cousins. I’d be bankrupt within a week.

My family tree sprawls far and wide. It’s not even a tree, really. More like an Amazonian forest. At last count, it was up to nearly 75 million family members. In fact, there’s a good chance you’re on some far-flung branch of my tree, and if you aren’t, you probably will be soon. It’s not really my tree. It’s our tree.

The previously staid world of genealogy is in the midst of a controversial revolution. A handful of websites have turbocharged family trees with a collaborative, Wikipedia-like approach. You upload your family tree, and then you can merge your tree with another tree that has a cousin in common. After that, you merge and merge again. This creates vast webs with hundreds of thousands — or millions — of cousins by blood and marriage, provided you think the links are accurate. One site, Geni, has what it calls the World Family Tree, with about 75 million relatives in more than 160 countries and all seven continents, including Antarctica.

My newfound kin include the actress and lifestyle guru Gwyneth Paltrow, a mere 17 steps away, and the jazz great Quincy Jones, a mere 22. There’s also the former New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who is apparently my wife’s great-uncle’s wife’s first cousin once removed’s husband’s uncle’s wife’s son’s wife’s first cousin once removed’s husband’s brother’s wife’s nephew.

These folks have no clue who I am. They have yet to return my calls. But at least according to this research, we are, in the broadest sense, family.

In a few years, we may have a single tree containing nearly all seven billion humans on earth. The Family of Man will no longer be an abstract cliché. We’re all related — we just have to figure out how.

Many traditional genealogists have serious reservations about this trend. The crowd-sourced family trees bring up thorny issues about accuracy, privacy and ownership of data. Critics point out, convincingly, that the shared trees are often poorly sourced and packed with errors that will take years to untangle. The most fervent opponents sabotage the trees by disconnecting branches. And if the general public knew how much of their family information was accessible, they might have a conniption.

It’s reminiscent of the battle between Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But this time it’s personal.

As your relative, I want to tell you that I’m in favor of a collaborative global family tree, despite its flaws. In fact, I’m helping to build such a tree for a book I’m writing. And, as part of the book, I plan to throw the biggest family reunion in history. I need at least 4,514 relatives to beat the current Guinness record, held by the Porteau-Boileve family in France. Note to Cousin Gwyneth: We’re going to need a lot of your vegan turkey casserole.

My journey started a few months ago. I got an email from a stranger named Jules Feldman who lives on a kibbutz in Israel. He had read one of my books. He wrote: “We have in our database about 80,000 relatives of yours. You are an eighth cousin of my wife who, in my opinion, is a fine lady.” I’m also, he said, related to Karl Marx and several European aristocrats.

The email had a bit of a creepy National Security Agency privacy-invasion vibe. But it was also, in a strange way, profoundly comforting. There I was, alone in my office, connected to 80,000 other humans. In a world where extended families lose touch as they spread across time zones, this seemed remarkable.

But why stop at 80,000? I discovered websites like WikiTree, WeRelate and Geni (which was recently acquired by MyHeritage) that allow you to expand your tree into million-tentacled monsters.

The popular website Ancestry.com offers some level of collaboration — for instance, you can invite relatives to add names to your tree.

But sites like Geni — a California-based company founded in 2006 — have a more radical model. You create a small tree by entering in your family members’ names and birth dates. Then algorithms detect when, say, the Henry Sussman in your tree might be the same Henry Sussman in another tree. If it’s a match, you can request to fuse the trees. (With Geni, the basic service is free, but to fully take advantage of the merging, you need to pay an annual $119 fee.)

My tour guide to Geni has been the lawyer E. Randol Schoenberg, a grandson of the composer Arnold Schoenberg. Mr. Schoenberg is a firebrand for crowd-sourced genealogy. (He’s also my 14th cousin twice removed.)

With his help, I learned to play the connection game. I now spend far too much time typing notable names into Geni’s search engine and waiting for it to uncover a path.

What about Stephen Hawking? No path yet. John Boehner, speaker of the House? No. Maybe Paul McCartney? Yes! Through Linda Eastman, who was the wife of the Beatle. My list of famous or infamous relatives has grown to more than 100.

Aside from the novelty factor, I’m bullish on the World Family Tree for several reasons. First, it would be an unprecedented record of humanity. Scientists believe it could provide important data on history and disease inheritance. In fact, we’re already seeing such fruit.

Last year, Yaniv Erlich, a fellow at the Whitehead Institute at M.I.T., presented preliminary results of his project FamiLinx, which uses Big Data from Geni’s tree to track the distribution of traits. His work has yielded a fascinating picture of human migration.

Second, a megatree might just make the world a kinder place. I notice that I feel more warmly about people I know are distant cousins. I recently figured out that I’m an 11th cousin four times removed of the TV personality Judge Judy Sheindlin. I’d always found her grating. But when I discovered our connection, I softened. She’s probably a sweetheart underneath the bluster.

That’s a trivial example, I know. But imagine how someone from the Ku Klux Klan might feel when he connects with his African-American relatives. They won’t be singing Kumbaya, but could it nudge him toward more tolerance? I hope so.

Some ambitious psychology professor needs to conduct a study about whether we deliver lower electrical shocks to people if we know we’re related.

As an organizing structure, family has always had its costs and benefits. It provides love and support. But it also encourages nepotism and tribalism. We tend to put our family’s well-being above that of society’s. Perhaps the reality of One Big Family will tip the balance toward the good.

I understand the privacy concern. But like it or not, the transparency train isn’t slowing down. Births and deaths are public records.

And for the vast majority of us cousins, I don’t foresee much harmful fallout from semi-public family trees, especially since the first names of living relatives usually remain hidden. These trees are exposing the names of uncles and aunts, not credit cards numbers and passwords. Mr. Schoenberg argues that many of us suffer from “narcissistic paranoia.” The world overflows with so much data, no one really cares who your sister is.

Another big problem: accuracy. Like Wikipedia, the shared websites allow collaborators to edit your family tree. Geni has more than eight million users, and about 120 volunteer curators. Mistakes can creep in. Documentation is sometimes still sparse. The tree’s accuracy will, I think, improve as more evidence is added. But it will never be perfect. Some avant-garde genealogists call their practice “quantum genealogy.” Traditional genealogists demand rigorous proof of every relationship, but the new, less cautious genealogists argue that we have to work with probabilities. We may never know for sure that X is Y’s uncle, but we can make educated guesses. (I think both types of genealogy have their place.)

The farther you go back, the more quantum it gets. According to Geni, my 97th great-grandfather is King David from the Bible. So what are the chances that I’m actually a direct descendant of the Goliath slayer? Count me a highly doubting Thomas. But it’s still fun to dive into the research and try to verify it.

In addition to using crowd-sourced trees, I’m trying to build my family list with genetic testing. I recently sent my saliva off to 23andMe (the F.D.A. has suspended the health-related part of 23andMe, but the ancestry service remains open). The result? I found more than a thousand fellow spitters who share enough genetic material that 23andMe says we are probable cousins. One such distant cousin: my wife. This was a tad jarring. Not to mention that it set off an avalanche of bad inbreeding and hillbilly jokes from friends. But the truth is, my wife and I aren’t unusual.

And that means, my cousin, you’re invited to a little get-together I’m planning: the mother of all family reunions. Next year, thousands of my relatives — from first cousins to 26th cousins — will, I hope, gather to eat some barbecued chicken, play tug of war and debate the meaning of family in this era of the global village. It’s my admittedly quixotic dream that when we realize that we’re all related, we’ll treat one another with more civility.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve started to tell cousins I know, and cousins I don’t, about my global family reunion. I’ve sent hundreds of save-the-date notices to relatives found through 23andMe, Geni and other sites. Reactions have been mixed. “Is this a scam?” wrote one distant cousin. Another said the notion of 5,000 new cousins sounded nightmarish: “I have enough family drama already.”

But many were more enthusiastic. “Par-teeee!!! wrote one cousin from England. Another quoted John Donne’s “no man is an island” and said that the event would show we were all “part of the main.”

I’ve already booked the venue and date. The reunion will be in 2015 at the New York Hall of Science in Queens, on the grounds of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs. It could backfire spectacularly. It could prove that familiarity breeds contempt and end with a huge brawl on the museum’s lawn. It could be that no one shows up.

I want the event to be as ethnically diverse as you can imagine, like the cover of a catalog for a liberal arts college. And politically diverse as well. A couple of weeks ago, I found a cousin who is a direct descendant of William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States. According to at least one amateur genealogist, all the presidents — with the exception of Martin Van Buren — are distantly related. I’m still verifying this bit of knowledge. But imagine if I can get Bushes mingling with Kennedys.

I hope the event will at least get my family talking. There’s much to debate. If everyone is related, what does the concept of family even mean? Is it so watered-down as to be senseless? Is the taboo against cousin marriage outdated? Should we honor our parents even if our parents are unpleasant people?

I don’t have all the answers. But I’ve got lots of smart relatives. I plan to invite some direct descendants of my second great-uncle’s third cousin’s wife’s first cousin — a physicist named Albert Einstein. Please come. We’ll serve his favorite strudel.

An editor at large at Esquire magazine and the author of “Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection.”